Friday, May 1, 2015

In Search of Umami

by Sheila Connolly

Recently I’ve
been reading Michael Pollan’s book Cooked.
It’s one of those books that’s easy to pick up and put down after reading a few
pages, so I’m not rushing through it. If you haven’t had the pleasure of
reading any of his books, he’s immensely entertaining, well-informed, and
curious about a lot of things, including food. And he really loves food: the
history, the making, the meaning, and the eating.

The book is
divided into sections. The first is Fire
(how humans started cooking food with heat, which does all sorts of great
things for the food and how we digest it). The second is Water, or how people cook with liquid. And that’s as far as I’ve
gotten so far. Still to come: Air
(baking) and Earth (fermentation). In
the Water section, Pollan talks about
umami.

For those of
us who grew up believing that there were four flavor senses on our tongue
(salty, sweet, sour and bitter), surprise! Scientists have confirmed a fifth
one, which has its own receptors not only on our tongues but in our stomachs.
We’ve all been enjoying it all our lives, but we didn’t know it. Its main
characteristic is that it balances flavors (it may also make you drool and make
your tongue feel fuzzy).

The sensation
is based primarily on glutamate, which is present in soy and mushrooms and tomatoes
and a lot of other things. And MSG (aka monosodium glutamate, or to us older
folk, Accent, which my mother used liberally), no surprise. I love Pollan’s
characterization of umami/glutamate: it italicizes
food. It has no flavor of its own, but it makes everything else taste better.

I asked my
husband (a scientist!) if he’d ever heard of umami, and he looked blank.

I developed a
sudden craving for umami. If there are umami cookbooks, I don’t know about
them. I looked at my fridge and my pantry. Hmm, a nice slow-cooked pork roast (a
tribute to Pollan’s first section!). I had scallions (Pollan also talks about
the significant contributions of the onion family in that first section). I had
soy sauce.

And I had a
weird package of dried something Chinese called “Black Fungus,” also known as
Cloud Ear Fungus. When our daughter lived with us, she would bring home all
sorts of exotic food products, many of which are still sitting on a shelf
waiting for me to figure out what to do with them. This was one of those. It is
widely used in all sorts of Asian cooking even outside of China, in Japan,
Hawaii, Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines. It is reputed to possess
anticoagulant properties, and may reduce cholesterol. How could I go wrong?

The
instructions were in Chinese, except for about three lines of English that were
not very helpful (1. Soak and wash the
black fungus clean with cold water. 2. Cook the black fungus throughly (sic) with 100 deg C boiled water. 3. Stir-fry or
stew the black fungus as per personal preferences.). But I figured, what
the heck?

When I was
last at the market, I also realized that I’d never cooked with soba (buckwheat)
noodles. Since I was venturing into uncharted territory for this recipe, I
decided that they were going into this dish too.

So here is
the result: my multi-national mishmash in search of umami.

In Search of Umami

1 lb. cooked
pork shredded (you can chop it finer if you insist, but the shreds work well
for texture)

4-5
scallions, cut into 1/2” lengths

1 clove
garlic, mashed or minced

Neutral
cooking oil (not olive oil)

1 package
dried black fungus (if you can’t find this, you can used any dried mushroom.
You might find dried wood-ear in your market, which is similar in texture to
the fungus.), soaked in boiling water and drained (you can save the soaking
water, strained, if you want to add more liquid to your dish). Note: as a
newbie, I made the whole package. These things expand! I’ve still got half of
the rehydrated fungi in my fridge, waiting for…I don’t know what.

Dry black fungus

Soaked black fungus

Chopped black fungus

1/4 cup soy
sauce

Salt to taste
(depending on how salty your soy sauce is)

1 lb soba
(buckwheat) noodles

Rehydrate
your fungi (wow, I never expected to say that!), then drain and slice into
ribbons or chop coarsely.

In a broad
pan or wok, add a bit of oil and briefly sauté the green onion and garlic over
medium heat (do not brown). Toss in the pork and fungi. Add the soy sauce and
toss, then heat through (you can add more soy sauce, or some of the fungus
liquid, if the mixture seems too dry).

Prepare the
noodles according to the package directions. (My package said, basically, boil
for 4 minutes and drain.) Put a serving of noodles in a bowl and spoon the
meat-fungus mixture over them, along with some of the liquid.

Quick and
easy. The fungus has a nice crunch, even after cooking, and there’s a good
blend of savory flavors—including umami!

And introducing... Defending the Dead, the third book in the Relatively Dead paranormal romance series.

Abby Kimball is slowly adjusting to her recently discovered
ability to see the dead, but none of the harmless sightings she’s experienced
so far could have prepared her for the startling apparition of a centuries-old
courtroom scene—where she locks eyes with a wicked and gleeful accuser.
Suddenly thrown back more than three hundred years, Abby realizes she’s been
plunged into a mystery that has fascinated people throughout American history: the
Salem witch trials.

With her boyfriend Ned at her side,
Abby digs into the history of the events, researching the people and possible
causes of that terrible time and her own connection to them—all the while going
more deeply into her connection to Ned, both extrasensory and romantic.

As Abby witnesses more fragments from the
events in Salem and struggles with the question of
how such a nightmare could have come about, she’s suddenly confronted with a
pressing personal question: Were one or more of her
ancestors among the accused?

Fun post, Sheila, and an adventurous recipe! (Libby, great suggestions, too.) I first learned about umami via my research into (of all things) coffee. Tasters use a colorful vocabulary in attempting to describe the many flavor notes in premium beans--and, yes, umami is one of them. FYI, for further reading, an interesting book dedicated to umami is titled exactly that and subtitled Unlocking the Secrets of the Fifth Taste. The author is Ole G. Mouritsen, a professor of molecular biophysics at the University of Southern Denmark (a bibliochef suggestion).